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FIFA Official Urges Worker Protections

Before a meeting of FIFA’s executive committee, union activists protested working conditions at World Cup stadiums in Qatar.Credit
Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters

ZURICH — A vice president of FIFA on Thursday called for global soccer’s governing body to insist on minimum standards of worker protection on World Cup projects amid allegations of abuse that have troubled construction projects for the 2022 finals in Qatar.

In an interview on the first day of the executive committee’s meetings at FIFA headquarters, Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan, a vice president and a member of the committee, urged FIFA to take a role in ensuring that similar controversies do not arise in the future.

“FIFA has to have a role,” he said when asked how it would respond to reports that dozens of Nepalese workers had died this year while working on construction projects in Qatar.

“Of course we can’t intervene in another country’s affairs,” he added. “But where we have a direct responsibility, for the stadiums for example, then we should have standards in place to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Also Thursday, the head of Qatar’s World Cup organizing committee, Hassan al-Thawadi, told reporters that he was “comfortable and confident” that the World Cup would not be moved out of the emirate as a result of the revelations, and he said his country was working with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International to address any concerns.

“It’s not a World Cup being built on the blood of innocents,” he said, according to the BBC. “That is unacceptable to anybody.”

An investigation by The Guardian of Britain into kafala, a system by which workers in Qatar are tied to their employers and prevented from leaving their jobs or the country without permission, found that nonpayment of wages and confiscation of passports were common. Many of the workers, the newspaper said, were living in squalid conditions in mass labor camps. In some cases they were forced to work without drinking water in searing summer temperatures.

Initial discussions about this week’s executive committee meetings had focused on whether the 2022 World Cup should be moved from the summer to the region’s cooler winter months. But the fallout from the discussion of worker rights led Michel Platini, the president of European soccer’s ruling body, UEFA, to add the issue to the agenda for the second day of meetings on Friday.

“It’s a Middle Eastern-wide issue,” Prince Ali said. “I’m from a country that has limited resources. I understand some of the issues here.”

Prince Ali, a brother of King Abdullah II of Jordan, is one of the executive committee’s new breed, a young and soft-spoken addition to a body that long endured accusations of corruption and mismanagement. The influx of new blood, Prince Ali said, has led to a new way of thinking within FIFA.

“A lot of work is being done, but it’s strange coming inside the organization,” he said. “There are some that can get a little defensive about new ideas and propositions. They feel like they have grown the sport, which they have done, and done a good job to get FIFA to where they are.

According to groups like Human Rights Watch, a lack of migrant worker rights has long been a problem in the Persian Gulf, but the World Cup has brought added visibility to an issue that affects millions of low-paid constructions workers, largely from Asia.

This week the International Trade Union Congress offered to provide FIFA with a team of workers to assess working conditions in Qatar, but Prince Ali is thought to be the first executive committee member to call for FIFA to set its own standards for World Cup projects.

On Friday, the executive committee is expected to discuss the possibility of switching the 2022 World Cup from summer to winter in the Northern Hemisphere. But a more likely outcome, at the behest of European leagues and American television networks that have complained about a rush to decide, will be a decision to continue to study the possibility of a move.

Despite the controversy about workplace safety, Prince Ali said the event would be “good for the Middle East, good for Asia.” He said the tournament should remain in Qatar but be moved to the winter.

“I wasn’t here for the original decision,” he said, noting that he was elected one month after the vote awarding the Cup was held in 2010. “But even then I was in favor of a winter World Cup in Qatar. The conditions are perfect.”

He also extinguished any lingering hopes that the 2022 finals could be put to a revote, or possibly moved to one of the other bidders, which included Australia and the United States.

“The World Cup will be in Qatar; the decision has been made,” he said, adding that a decision on the tournament’s timing was unlikely to be made Friday, as many had hoped. “We have nine years. We don’t have to rush this.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 4, 2013, on Page B11 of the New York edition with the headline: FIFA Official Urges Worker Protections. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe